[MissoulaGov] cats & dogs & stewardship

[Marilyn Marler]

    Now that I've taken a full day to decompress from Bob's description of the "dogs off leash" discussion, I can cheerfully say that, unlike Jason (apparently) I *did* run for council at least in part because of my interest in conservation issues and good stewardship of natural areas and wildlife.
    Cats roaming free in town *do* have negative impacts to native wildlife. They kill a lot of birds. If only we could train them to kill starlings and house sparrows, but we can't. They just as happily eat migratory warblers or northern flickers (our neighbors' cat killed a flicker just recently). Birds have enough issues with habitat loss; do we have to also accept that our pets "need" to eat them?  Cats can hunt even with bells, even if they are de-clawed. You might not see it, but it happens.  Denial is not a river in Egypt, as they say.  And I'm not even getting into general bad cat behavior like pooping in garden beds and so on, which is a legitimate quality of life issue. We need to move towards cats as indoor pets, although I don't think its appropriate for government to require it.  You can't have it both ways- be an advocate of local wildlife and an advocate of outdoor unsupervised cats. (note: I have 3 rescued cats who I love dearly).
    Dogs off leash in our conservation areas *do* have negative impacts to native wildlife.  One person wrote to this list serve that she saw "only" 8 incidents per year of dogs harrassing wildlife.  I did some math and if one person who spends 520 hours per year on one area of open space sees 8 incidents per year, and you expand that to cover 8 hours a day for 260 days, and then expand that to 4 conservation areas (North Hills, Mt Sentinel, L trail, Lincoln Hills), then someone's dog is harassing wildlife about avery 3rd day. I think that is very conservative because 1) a lot happens out of eyesight, and 2) there are more than 8 hours per day that people are walking dogs on conservation areas, and 3) you could probably divide those conservation areas each again for a multiplyer of 8 instead of 4. So conservatively, every other day.
    Bob, you included some obnoxiuos descriptions of arguements in favor of leashed dogs. You did not include Pam's suggestion that dogs off leash harassing wildlife might be a positive thing because we have too many urban deer.  If we are going to do something about our urban deer population, I really hope we can aspire to do something humane and productive, rather than letting dogs run them to death.
    Again, I'm only focusing on conservation/stewardship issues here. Not social issues of whether I want someone's dog tripping me while I'm out for a run (as happens almost every time I run on the river trail which is technically a leash area but I'm good natured so I deal with it), or stealing my food when I'm working on Mt Sentinel. (note: I love dogs)
    And I'll close with something that is more of a topic for a book I'm writing in my head- Can we please start moving beyond a false dichotomy of Human Influenced vs Non Human Influenced places?  The world is human influenced.  Let's make mindful choices always. We CAN have our pets but respect wildlife. We CAN have landscaping that makes room for biodiversity and wildlife.  It's old fashioned to think of humans as only having detrimental effects on nature.  2 good books I'm reading now (for those of you looking for winter reading):  The Sunflower Forest and Bringing Nature Home.  Thanks for listening to my thoughts on this. Marilyn


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jason Wiener 
  To: missoulagov at cmslists.com 
  Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 9:10 PM
  Subject: Re: [MissoulaGov] committee update 1-28-09


  Amen. Though I will eventually have to do so, I sure didn't run because I wanted to spend time regulating the presence, absence or behavior of small animals. I guess the chicken shit should have tipped me off though, huh? 

   
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